“Get in losers, we’re going shopping.”
That’s a pop culture reference that doesn’t have anything to do with anything we’re doing, but I was told to open with a pop culture reference, so it was either that or piling onto some new meme bandwagon.
So you may or may not notice in the coming days that you’re getting an update to Craft Check. You may or may not be asking yourself what’s different. We may or may be about to tell you right now.
First things first, we had this…bug. We’ll call it a bug. For now. But this bug as the kind of bug that broke literally the one thing our little app is supposed to do. So I guess it was more like one of the bugs from Starship Troopers. Big bug. Long story short, we fixed it.
Second things…second (Jesus Barrett, get it together…) since this bug required making a lot of backend changes, we took advantage and refactored much of how the app receives updates and displays information. See, we have big plans for Craft Check, and some of those plans exceeded what our previous infrastructure allowed. So we made new infrastructure. Easy to write, hard to do - which is why I do the writing, and the brains of our operation, Rudy, does the doing. So while things may look the same, underneath the hood it’s very, very different, and we’re starting to lay the groundwork for our long-term Craft Check goals.
Third, if you’re on iOS, you may notice that our User Interface has changed. Turns out that those same big plans needed a little more space to breathe. Don’t worry Android, we’ll get to you ASAP. There’s just some additional testing particular to Android devices that’s needed to ensure we don’t break everything on one or more handsets. Right now all you’ll see is a link to our blog, but in the near future we’re gonna start adding many of the features you’ve been asking for, and some that you didn’t even know you wanted.
Lastly, and possibly most importantly, we’d like to send a very special thank you to Starr Hill Brewery for their patience while we made these changes. We discovered this bug when the we tried to correct a mistake we’d made with their Craft Brewery status. Starr Hill kindly confirmed their status as a Craft Brewery, and politely stood by while we went through the effort to fix the bug that continued to incorrectly listed their brewery as non-craft. We’re very happy to say that they’re good people making great craft beer, and recommend you track down a couple of their beers - you won’t be disappointed.
So what’s next? Well the new UI may give you some hints. We’ll be testing and rolling out some new features over the coming months across both platforms, so you may see some nifty things pop up here and there. As always, let us know what you think.
